Globalizing Māori Museology: Reconceptualizing Engagement, Knowledge, and Virtuality through Mana Taonga

Abstract

This article sets out to globalize Māori museology through mana taonga, a concept that is historically grounded and articulated in contemporary museum practice. Mana taonga can be used to reconceptualize issues of engagement, knowledge, and virtuality by exploring ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross‐cultural curatorship and anthropology in the present. In doing so, the Cook/Forster Collection held at the Georg‐August‐Universität Göttingen, Germany, is being (re)approached from a Māori perspective. This collection embodies the first material evidence of the remarkable encounter between Pacific and European people in the 1700s and materializes the moment when two worlds of meaning became entangled and mutually constitutive with continuing significance for Pacific people and European understandings. Reconnecting both sides of the encounter through research on the history of the collection, its contemporary legacy, and Māori engagements with Western anthropology and museology allows us to correct lopsided (re)interpretations of indigenous cultures in exhibitionary projects and one‐sided accounts of museums and indigenous people that dominate the literature.

Working Through Colonial Collections

“…(Macdonald, 2002;Yaneva, 2012;Morgan, 2013;Bunzl, 2014;Franklin, 2014;Shannon, 2014;Bouquet, 2015;Jung, 2015;Kreplak, 2017;Marsh, 2019); analysis of how museums present and communicate about themselves, notably via exhibitions, and howyond p their role is perceived and negotiated by others (Butler, 1999;Price, 2007;Meza Torres, 2011;von Bose, 2016;Porsché, 2018); how they are used by their publics or how museums try to engage these publics (Roberts, 1997;Bhatti, 2012;Schmitt, 2012;Morse & Munro, 2015;Knudsen, 2016;Debary & Roustan, 2017;Kendzia, 2017;Sabeti, 2018). They include ethnographies of processes of conservation, archiving, and digitisation (Geismar, 2013;Domínguez Rubio, 2014;Beltrame, 2015), and of community work and collaborative projects (Hendry, 2005;Krmpotich & Peers, 2013;Schorch, McCarthy, & Hakiwai, 2016), and finally, of collecting practices, both contemporary and historical (O'Hanlon, 1993;Förster & Stoecker, 2016). 23.…”

No Museum is an Island: Ethnography beyond Methodological Containerism

“…Most ethnographies have approached the museum via their work cultures and, or particular practices, such as exhibitionmaking (Macdonald 2002 . Only a small number look at practices that explicitly cross the museum's borders or that extend its scope, such as into community work (Hendry 2005;Krmpotich and Peers 2013;Schorch et al 2016); knowledge exchange with amateurs (Meyer 2008) or the museum's collecting practices (O'Hanlon 1993;Förster and Stoecker 2016). Even where the boundaries are crossed, however, most ethnographies still take the museum as an organization for granted.…”

Introduction

“…36 However, we argue that the postcolonial critique of anthropology and museums overlooks a long and fruitful history of engagement by Native and tribal people, 37 failing to engage meaningfully with Indigenous scholars, concepts and frameworks. 38 We look to work on colonial museums which figures them as relational entities interconnected with networks of institutions and processes, and objects as active things. 39 While we have to be aware of the shortcomings of much work that rather glibly puts an optimistic spin on the difficult work of community engagement and collaboration, 40 in recent years there has been much impressive research showing how curators, particularly in former colonies, have attempted to work in dialogue with Indigenous people, in what has often been called co-curation.…”

“…10 Given the emerging mutual dependence of scientific travel practices, materialities, and academic disciplines in the eighteenth century, it can be argued instead that the encounter with Pacific people, among others, and their material manifestations in objects, had a significant influence on the development of new ideas, such as the Enlightenment, 11 an intersection of global encounters and European knowledge practices. 12 In other words, the Enlightenment should not be seen as a singular event originating in some (European) centre and radiating out into the global peripheries, rather it was a 'process of global circulation, translation, and transnational co-production'. 13 Since the same epoch in the eighteenth century, anthropology (and anthropological curatorship) has developed through scientific exploration and colonial expansion beyond Europe, as well as the establishment of ethnographic collections and museums in Europe, thus institutionalising and materialising the global circulation, translation and co-production of ideas.…”